Winter's Bone

Perhaps no one in Hollywood has had a bigger year than Jennifer Lawrence, the star of The Hunger Games last spring and a near lock to win the Oscar for "best supporting actress" in a month. Me, I've been a J-Law fan ever since the day I saw someone on the red carpet for the Academy Awards two years ago looking like this:

Over the course of the evening it became apparent that this pretty little thing had been nominated for her role in a movie called Winter's Bone, an independent movie that had itself been nominated for best picture. I was immediately interested. Fast forward almost two years, and I've finally put that interest to rest. There's not much to say about Winter's Bone, a hundred-minute drama about a gritty seventeen-year-old girl who needs to track down her meth-cooking father, dead or alive, in order to keep the house in which she takes care of her younger siblings and mentally unwell mom. I mean, it was a good movie, first of all. But it was also a slow-moving one in which little more happens than what I've already described. Normally, a movie like that would bore me at least a little bit. Not so here. Winter's Bone does a fantastic job just dipping you right down into the cold, shitty, poverty-stricken woods of rural Missouri. You're rooting for J-Law immediately not only because of the situation she's in, but also because it seems like every grown man in the area is a drug-addicted wife-beater. Yes, this is probably playing up the unflattering bits and pieces of redneck meth-county culture, but never for laughs; always for tension and drama. The most memorable scene in the film is its climax, which I won't spoil, but I will simply say that it involves a rowboat and a chainsaw. Not a lot of movies can get by on the strength of their atmosphere and lead performances alone, but this one did just that.